Welcome! We hope you enjoy following the restoration process of a 1918 Curtiss JN4D Jenny.
Once completed, the aeroplane will be flown and displayed at the Candler Field Museum in Williamson GA (30 miles south of Atlanta).
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Fairbanks residents are anticipating the return of their most iconic
aviation artifact to Fairbanks International Airport this fall.

The 1923 Curtiss Jenny flown by aviation legends Ben Eielson and Joe Crosson
was removed when the terminal was expanded and it settled into a
lengthy refurbishment under the care of the Pioneer Air Museum and
Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), FAI chapter -- Chapter 1129.
Coordinated by member Roger Weggel, an airframe and powerplant (A&P)
instructor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Jenny has been
taken apart and reassembled with great care. But Weggel is quick to
point out this isn’t a new plane.

This
Jenny will never be museum quality. Rather, the Eielson/Crosson
aircraft sports evidence of work done by all the men who took care of
the aircraft the past 90 years, including highly regarded Alaska
mechanics Jim Hutchinson and Frank Reynolds.

The Jenny was purchased as a surplus vehicle from the U.S. military in 1923 by city leaders. According to Jean Potter’s “The Flying North”,
published in 1945, pioneer banker Dick Wood put up most of the money.
It arrived in crates on July 1 with its 90-horsepower OX-5 engine and
had its first flight only three days later with Wood onboard and Eielson
flying.

“Someone HAD to go,” News-Miner editor W.F. Thompson wrote
later, “so Dick decided it might as well be him. It was disturbing
however, he continued, “(to see) two of the best men in town,
everybody’s friends, settin’ one behind the other in a rig not much
wider than a canoe...”

Thankfully, the flight was successful, and on
the wings of the Jenny, commercial aviation came to Alaska. In the years that followed, the Jenny was involved -- like every other early aircraft -- in numerous incidents and accidents.

Eielson, who may be best known for flying the first airplane across
the Arctic Ocean, soon began flying a Liberty-powered De Havilland for
the postal service, and by the time of his death in a Hamilton
Metalplane in 1929, the Jenny had likely seen several other pilots.

Crosson, the pilot who made the first landing on Mount McKinley in 1932,
flew it soon after arriving in 1926 (he related a story to Jean Potter
about flipping it on landing when flying a miner 70 miles to a claim on
the Upper Chena). At some point in this period, Weggel is certain that
Crosson became the aircraft’s owner, and in 1931 was responsible for an
engine change to the more powerful Hispano-Suiza, which is on it today.
This was a common conversion at the time as the OX-5 was widely
acknowledged not to be strong enough.

Hanging from rafters

Over the next 10 years, the
Jenny was flown by unknown pilots, although the technology was rapidly
outpacing it. Jean Potter saw the Jenny in the company of Fairbanks
mechanic/carpenter Frank Reynolds while researching The Flying North in early 1940s. She later wrote:

He took me once to the shed behind the college powerhouse where Eielson’s old Jenny is stored.

“There
it is,” he told me, turning a flashlight into the gloom. “There’s Ben’s
first ship. We wish we had room to show it better.”

It
hung from the rafters, the narrow, tapering fuselage, with the flimsy
wings tied ignominiously along its sides. The engine was gone. The paint
was scratched and peeling. Reynolds looked as proud as if he were
displaying a Superfortress.

“I’ve
helped him take her up many times,” he said. “Two or three fellows
would hold hands, you know, and the one on the end would reach out and
spin the prop. Sometimes took a whole hour to get him going. ‘Contact,’
Ben’d say, ‘switch off. Contact, switch off.’ We’d have to pour ether in
the gas. She was stubborn, that engine.”

The Jenny’s
original wings were lost long ago, likely in a fire at Weeks Field when
undergoing maintenance during the Crosson phase of its ownership. When
the aircraft was cleaned up by some airmen and displayed for Eielson Air
Force Base’s 10th anniversary in 1953, a set of wings that were stored
with it from a Swallow TP
were attached in their place. The Swallow was a biplane manufactured in
Wichita by a company that employed such future aviation stars as
Walter Beech (Beechcraft) and Lloyd Stearman (Stearman Aircraft). After
the military celebration the Jenny was placed back in storage at the
university with the Swallow wings attached. There it remained for
decades. (The engine was back with the aircraft at this time so must
have been in use elsewhere during Potter’s earlier visit.)

It is clear that as much as Weggel and his crew know about the Jenny, there is a lot they never knew:• How it came to be at UAF, and why it was stored there for so long?•
Is its ownership by the Museum of the North due less to provenance than
an assumed responsibility brought by years of having the aircraft under
university control?

$22,000 project

When the decision to refurbish it was
presented to the EAA, however, none of that mattered. “The decision was
unanimous to fix it,” says Weggel, and so the group of volunteers got
to work raising money ($22,000 to date, with a portion still in the
bank) and bringing back to life this vital piece of the city’s past. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum provided
original plans for the Curtiss Jenny, but it took nearly a year and a
half before they could be located and forwarded to Fairbanks. The
package included five 35-millimeter microfiche films that dated to the
First World War when the Jennys were designed and built. The
Eielson/Crosson Jenny likely was manufactured in California at the end
of the war, although no one can be certain. The propeller (not the
original) is marked “War Department” and was made for the OX-5. For
Weggel that is good enough. The prop is period correct, along with the
engine and fuselage. However, the wings would have to be made from
scratch.

Every Wednesday for years a rotating group of EAA
members and UAF students met and worked on the Jenny. They soon
discovered evidence of work done in years past and made a decision to
respect such alterations and let them stand whenever possible. “We left
old repairs and modifications to areas of the fuselage, the landing gear
and elsewhere” Weggel said. “We didn’t want the aircraft to be factory
new; we want it to carry the mark of what it was part of and how it was
taken care of by so many different people over the years. We want it to
look like the plane that it was in Alaska.”

Remarkably, the
Jenny has been restored to air-worthy condition, although due to its
rarity and value (perhaps more than $400,000), it will never fly. But
soon enough, it will be back on display for all to see with bright
yellow and light blue paint. When that happens, Weggel and his crew will
be able to turn their attention to a new project, a hoped-for
restoration shop at the Air Museum in Pioneer Park
and a build focusing on those Swallow wings. “They came off a plane
Crosson flew,” says Weggel, “and we believe it was also flown by Sam
White, the first flying game warden in Alaska.”It’s
another big project but as the group has proven, it’s up to the task.
The legacies of Ben Eielson and Joe Crosson are safe with the Fairbanks
aviation community.

It’s entire flying life, this aircraft
never left Alaska,” says Weggel. “It has always belonged here, to us.”
And so the Jenny remains, in the place that knows her best and with an
aviation community delighted to celebrate all she represents.

Colleen
Mondor is a former dispatcher for a Fairbanks-based air carrier. Her
book, The Map Of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska,
details her years working in the Alaska aviation industry. You can
contact her at colleen(at)alaskadispatch.com.